Overview

A phantom limb is flesh become memory... Sternburg uses the phenomenon as a metaphor for the loss of our loved ones, who remain intimately with us even after they're gone. -Los Angeles Times Book Review Phantom Limb is a wise and courageous memoir that moves between past and present, chronicling an adult daughter's journey through the final years of her parents' lives. A story of discovering love through adversity as well as an inquiry into contemporary neurology and spiritual life, Phantom Limb is a moving meditation on the struggle to make peace with physical and emotional ghosts of the past. Janet Sternburg write with such warmth and honesty that loss itself becomes luminous: This is the grace of the last years, the children coming to understand the contradictions in their parents, not to reconcile them but encompass them in a larger love. Janet Sternburg has found the perfect metaphor for the tragedy of pain and loss, the ultimate inevitabilities of life. -Bill Moyers [Sternburg is] every one of us who has cared for aging parents... She has faced the crucial questions: What do we owe to our parents? What do we owe to ourselves? -The Orange County Register A mosaic of understanding, reconciliation, and ultimately acceptance. -The Bloomsbury Review Sternburg is so skillful, so acute in her descriptions and so filled with a useful sense of the absurd that the painful becomes transformative. -Jewish Exponent Sternburg's prose is powered by imagistic accuracy and psychological immediacy-two horses that lesser writers let run wild. She holds their reins in a firm hand, and gently guides this book with intelligence and humility... This is a book for anyone not afraid to look. -Liana Holmberg, Manoa

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9780996528900

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Janet Sternburg is a writer of memoir, essays, poetry and plays, as well as a fine-art photographer. Her books include Phantom Limb, the classic two volumes of The Writer on Her Work, described as groundbreaking...a landmark, and Optic Nerve: Photopoems. Her work in theatre and film has included Director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club (1971-80) and director of the award-winning film Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole; her play, The Fifth String was produced this past May 2012 at New York's La Mama Theater. In 1998, Sternburg picked up a camera and began another life as a photographer. Her work has now been shown at museums and galleries around the world, with solo shows in Berlin, Munich, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Korea, where she was commissioned by The Seoul Institute of the Arts to create a full-building installation. Portfolios of her work have been published in Aperture and Art Journal. Janet lives in Los Angeles and is married to Steven D. Lavine, President of the California Institute of the Arts, traveling worldwide with him on behalf of the Institute and serving as partner on many ventures. Her honors include fellowships and residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Embassy in Berlin, The MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She is one of forty artists from around the world selected by The Utne Reader as movers and shakers...whose art will change the world...full of ideas and insights that challenge us to live more fully.

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